The Complete Karma Trilogy (21 page)

There was a general muttering of affirmation from the crowd.

“Good, very good.”

One of them suddenly spoke up, his eyes gazing off into the distance behind them. “Guys,” he said. “Those are police officers. They’re headed straight this way.”

“Jackson,” Charles said, angry. “You said it was going to be alright.”

“I can promise you, Brother Charles, they’re not here because of me.”

“How can you promise that?”

Before he had a chance to respond, a searing beam cut through their midst, hitting no one, but splitting the ground apart between them.

“They’re firing? They’re actually firing at us?”

“Just run!” Charles yelled, over the confusion. “The plan is the same. Split up.”

As they diffused, more beams rained down upon them, and Helicars were hovering overhead.

Ronin 7

Knife in Hand

“I’m still mad
at you,” Toru said to Reiko, as they walked the night streets of Kabukichou, the red light district of Shinjuku. Haru had called Reiko at around seven, and told her to meet him at a club at ten. It was a Friday night, and the streets were alive with the buzz of activity. Neon images were burned into Reiko’s eyes, from the countless signs that she couldn’t avoid looking at. She was dizzy, and let Toru lead her as they made turns and pushed their way through crowds.

“And for no real good reason,” Reiko said. “This is a strange place for a meeting, isn’t it?”

“If we can meet here, it works,” was Toru’s concise answer.

They found the club. Inside it was dark, and loud techno music was playing as the silhouetted forms of people danced. Reiko and Toru pushed through towards the back, where Haru had told them there was a staircase they should take. Reiko could feel the sweat of all the people she passed. It reminded her how humid Japan was in the summer.

At the top of the stairs it was less crowded, and there were many doors that led into private rooms. They told a security guard that they were looking for Haru Nakata, and the guard walked off to use an intercom system, to ask Haru if they were invited, Reiko assumed. When the guard came back to them, he gestured for them to follow as he turned and went down a hallway.

A multitude of strange sounds could be heard behind every doorway they passed. Music, talking, laughter, human exertion. Reiko tried to picture the contents of every room, in the brief few seconds she had before they had moved in front of another. Finally the guard stopped in front of a room, and knocked. On the other side, Haru yelled for them to come in.

Inside, Haru was sitting at the edge of a bed with ten girls around him, one of them on his lap. They all wore tight, revealing clothing, and were covered in colorful shades of makeup. The room was darker than the rest of the club, and the bass of the music downstairs filled it. The girl on his lap was kissing the side of his face when they entered.

“Is this a bad time?” Reiko asked, the first to say anything. She could hear the sound of the guard leaving, behind her.

“It’s the time I told you, isn’t it?” Haru said. He stood up without warning the girl on his lap, which caused her to fall awkwardly to the floor, but he didn’t notice. He seemed to be fairly drunk, by the way he staggered to stand with them by the doorway. On his way, he became distracted by a drink he found on a table that was against the wall, which was littered with empty glasses and bottles. When he had finished draining its contents, he made it the rest of the way to the door, where they were standing.

“I brought Toru,” Reiko continued. “Who did you bring?” She leaned around Haru, to stare at all of the girls behind them. “Programmers? These must be programmers.”

“Prostitutes,” Haru assured her in a confiding voice. “Prostitutes aren’t programmers. But programmers are prostitutes, the converse holds true. It’s like squares and rectangles. Anyway, follow me,” he told them, as he walked out of the door. Reiko and Toru followed. After ten steps he turned around, went back to the room, and said, “Mineko, I believe I’ve paid for another several hours of your time, so if you’ll come along. The rest of you, whatever.”

Instead of talking to Haru as they walked back downstairs, through the crowd of people, and onto the Tokyo streets, Reiko talked to Mineko the prostitute as they walked behind Haru and Toru. Toru spoke in quiet tones that Reiko couldn’t have made out even if she was paying attention, whereas Haru was yelling everything that he said, in a way that seemed directed to no one in particular, although Reiko assumed it fit into his conversation with Haru. Reiko didn’t care. She asked the prostitute, “Do you enjoy your job?”

Mineko was unabashed. “I enjoy making as much money as I do, and for hardly any work at all.”

Reiko said, “I’ve just graduated, and I have yet to find a permanent, real job. I guess you can say that I’m still searching the market, looking for the right fit. Are there any openings, at your job? Are they looking to hire?”

The prostitute eyed her carefully, first to see how serious she was, and then from head to foot. Reiko was very aware that Mineko was evaluating her physical features, her sexual appeal, and she waited to be judged. Nearly all of her life, Reiko had been a very skinny, sexless thing, until just a year before when it suddenly happened all at once that she developed a full form, although she remained very thin. “You think you’re qualified for this kind of job?” Mineko asked.

“I have a degree in psychology,” Reiko said. “And I’ve become quite the expert on rats, somehow. What more were you looking for?”

“Maybe that’s enough,” Mineko said.

“Describe to me the most interesting experience you’ve had, in your line of work. If you wouldn’t mind sharing, that is. I want to know what kind of experiences I could expect with this job, before I just commit.”

The prostitute took a moment to think. They walked along the street, neon signs flashing, the smell of a street vendor’s food strong in the air. Reiko could barely hear. “This was a few years ago. I had a very rich customer, wore an expensive suit, had an expensive watch, drove an expensive car, had too much cologne on. The more I think about it, the more I doubt that he really was rich—he probably spent everything he had on the things that I saw, in the course of that night.

“Anyway, he had a real country accent. Some people speak the very same language as you and yet you can’t understand a thing they say, you know what I mean? He wasn’t quite like that. You could understand the things he said just fine, but you could tell he had to put in a lot of practice to get there. It was still somewhere deep inside his voice. I tried to bring it up with him, but he wouldn’t talk about it. We didn’t talk about anything, really.

“First thing he did was take me to a nice clothes place, and he had some lady pick out a dress and some shoes for me. He told me it was a gift for my services, and that he wanted me to wear them, so I changed. Then he drove me to a real fancy restaurant in Arakichou, where there was already a table reserved. Before we sit down, he tells me to do whatever he says. I don’t know what he means, but I’m paid for that kind of thing, so I don’t think anything of it.

“He told me I could order anything I wanted. I had never been to such a fancy restaurant, and I didn’t recognize anything on the menu, so I ended up just having a salad and some wine. After we ordered, some other woman shows up, and he makes a big deal about bringing up a third chair, introducing me as his new fiancé.

“She has this indescribable look on her face. I’m not good with words, so maybe it’s my fault I can’t describe it, but really I’ve never seen this look before. So much anger, and at the same time so much sadness. And some other things that I can’t understand, because I don’t have strong emotions, I never have. She asks to see the ring. The guy is looking at me real worried, because he must have forgot that his fiancé should have a ring, and I tell this lady that I don’t believe in jewelry, that I’m just not that kind of girl, because I agreed I would play along with whatever he was doing.

“I thought it was his sister maybe, who we were lying to. She’s wearing a wedding ring herself, and he’s not, so I ruled them being married to each other out. And he kept asking her about how his family was, his parents, and friends he didn’t talk to anymore, and she would always just give a short reply that they were fine, nothing to say. Except Jiro, Jiro died. It didn’t bother him that much. I thought maybe he was having family problems, and was talking in a public area to keep everyone respectable. Privacy makes people very unrespectable, that’s what I think, so it made sense.

“Right after our food gets there, and she hasn’t even ordered yet, the guy leaves us at the table, says he has to use the restroom. While he’s gone, she slides over into his seat, and I’m thinking she’s going to eat his food since he was rude and didn’t wait, that’s what I would have done myself—she unravels his napkin, takes out his silverware. She asks me how I could do such a things, as what I was doing.

“I figured that she knew I was a prostitute, since I’m probably not a very good actor, and I’ve disappointed her in some way. I just shrug my shoulders, because what else can I say? And she stabs me in the hand with a steak knife.”

Mineko showed Reiko a scar on the back of her right hand, about a two centimeters in length, between her thumb and her pointer finger. She turned her hand over, to show Reiko that it continued on the other side.

“I broke a wine bottle on her head, because it seemed reasonable to me at the time. And then I start to run away, with this knife still lodged in my hand. Everyone’s looking at me. Just as I’m about to the door, the guy comes out of the bathroom and catches me by the arm. He—”

Mineko’s story was interrupted by a man that attacked Haru from an alleyway they were walking by. The man grabbed Haru by the hair and pulled him into the obscurity around the corner. Toru hesitated for a second, and then followed after him. Haru was shouting fiercely, and other people were yelling guttural sounds that had no meaning. Reiko didn’t know what to do.

Two more men came out of the alleyway, and looked at Reiko and Mineko. Mineko said, “I think I’ve fulfilled my services for the day,” and began running away, back in the direction they had come from.

Without acknowledging her potential assailants, Reiko yelled back at her, “You didn’t finish your story!”

Mineko yelled, without looking back, “I never finish!”

“A stupid time for jokes, don’t you think?” Reiko asked the two strangers. Before they could respond, Toru appeared again from the alleyway, and kicked one of them in the head. It sent the man reeling into a wall headfirst, where he collapsed. The second man didn’t have time to react before Toru kicked out the man’s knee. The knee bothered Reiko more than the head had—she had never seen a knee bend the way the man’s did as he fell to the ground, wracked with pain.

“Toru, that’s disgusting!” Reiko said.

“Just run!” Toru yelled. Close behind him was Haru, who had a bruised eye and a torn shirt. They ran through the busy streets, knocking unwitting bystanders over when it couldn’t be avoided. Reiko had never felt so alive.

“What happened?” she gasped between breaths, as they ran aimlessly.

“This place has a lot of gang activity. I might have done something to provoke them,” Haru said. He ran very awkwardly, either because he was injured or because he was still very drunk.

“You’re a genius,” Reiko replied. Next to her, Toru ran silently. Reiko said, “Where did you learn that stuff? That was a really high kick.”

“I’ve been doing karate and aikido ever since I was a kid.”

“I never would have known,” Reiko said. She looked back at where Haru had been running behind them. He wasn’t there anymore. “Haru’s gone,” she said.

They stopped, and looked all around. They were in some other busy street, full of clubs and bars and small restaurants. Reiko didn’t know where. “Where the hell did he go?” Toru asked the city.

“Do you want to try to find him? He can’t have gotten too far.”

“We can try. I’d like to know why he thought that he might have provoked men like that. It always gets weirder and weirder, associating with Haru. I knew that, and yet I gave you that number anyway. I think I regret my decision.”

“Don’t say that. Let’s look for him, and see if he has a good reason.”

They spent the next fifteen minutes walking into clubs only to turn around and leave, and peering into restaurant windows. They finally found him in a brightly lit ramen shop on the corner of a large intersection.

“You’re eating? Right now?” Reiko asked, incredulous, after they had taken a seat on either side of him at a bar that lined the window.

“I got hungry,” he said.

“Why were those men attacking you, was it a coincidence?” Toru asked.

“I probably did something,” Haru replied.

“That’s not specific enough of an answer for me,” Toru said. In the bright light Reiko could see the veins in his furrowed eyebrow, and the sweat that streamed from his head across his face.

“I don’t know what to tell you.” Haru only spared a few words between every mouthful of ramen.

“What are you buying prostitutes for?” Reiko asked, uninterested in the men that had attacked them.

“The Americans bought them. It seemed reasonable to me, and hopefully to their Karma computer program, that the dissolute American ‘soldiers’ would spend a lot of company money partying, and buying prostitutes. So I diverted a lot of their money, and left a nice digital trail leading back to the guys that took over Kenko. But it seemed such a shame that the prostitutes should be all paid for, with no one to enjoy them. So I took some liberties.”

“These prostitutes saw you,” Toru said, “and you’re obviously not an American. Did you ever think of that?”

“I don’t think that’s important,” Haru said.

“He’s still going to help us, right? You didn’t mess that up?” Reiko asked Toru. “I wasn’t listening to whatever it was you were talking about earlier, before the fight.”

“If you really want him to,” Toru responded, not caring if Haru heard his ambivalence.

“I don’t see what other choice we would have.”